


The Dangers of Going Native

by 22to22, tcwordsmith



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Body Horror, Gen, Gore, Leviathan - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-14
Updated: 2012-12-14
Packaged: 2017-11-21 02:48:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,918
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/592592
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/22to22/pseuds/22to22, https://archiveofourown.org/users/tcwordsmith/pseuds/tcwordsmith
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>He’s still Jimmy Novak who has never had anything bad happen to him. Isn’t he?</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Dangers of Going Native

**Author's Note:**

> 22to22 is my co-author on this project and she's awesome and amazing. She can also be found at 22to22.tumblr.com. She is solely responsible for the superb art for this fic.
> 
> We sincerely hope you enjoy this; it was truly a labor of love. Please heed any and all warnings, self care comes first!

 

 

He figures the angel must have finally let him go. He doesn’t have it in him to question anything, he’s just so glad to be unchained.  He goes home as fast as he can; he’ll beg Amelia to take him back, he’ll do anything she wants. He just needs to be Jimmy Novak who has never had anything bad happen to him.  
  
Amelia makes them sandwiches like she used to. Claire doesn’t ask about saying Grace anymore; he imagines if she did, he’d say he’s felt enough Grace for a lifetime. But at the beginning of every meal, Jimmy can feel a pang in the hole Castiel left in his chest.  The edges are still rough and calloused, and Amelia’s cooking turns to ash in his mouth. He finishes his sandwich.  
  
At night, Jimmy dreams of the vast pall of space. He dreams of twisting bodies that move without reason. Whispers hiss and steam in a different language, an old language, even older than the tongues of angels--maybe older than God’s, he fears. In the morning he wakes to dried blood on his pillow trailing from his ear.  
  
He empties the refrigerator of leftovers and takes to eating food straight from the can. He doesn’t understand why he’s so hungry; he doesn’t understand why anything he eats lays heavy and ashen on his tongue.  Maybe it’s a lingering effect from Castiel’s brush with Famine. That’s the theory he goes with, but it doesn’t explain the dreams.  
  
It doesn’t explain the singing.  
  
He only mentions it once, because it's not an angel's voice, he knows what an angel's voice sounds like, what is that, can you hear that? Can you hear it? It itches at the inside of his eardrum and he didn't know it could itch there, and it's a not-quite sound almost ringing in his ears. But then he remembers the problems the angel managed to cause, so he stops talking about it, and he takes the pills Amelia asks him to, because it's only fair. He pretends it's the pitch of the television, or of the lights--has to be. It's just a trick of his mind and it'll go away if he ignores it. It'll go away, the angel went away eventually, but they have to hear it they just have to--it’s so very loud, why can't they hear it?  
  
One day he sees a man on the evening news--they’re calling him the new God. He sees his face smeared with blood peering curiously into the camera. He looks so much like him it's terrifying. He thinks he's hallucinating, how could anything look that much like him and not be him? Unconsciously, he licks his own lips. He doesn't know why but it happens, usually when the singing is loudest. He chews through his lip before he notices.  
  
Amelia smells so good.  
  
They make love but it's not like he remembers, there's something off, something neither of them can place. He feels ...detached sometimes. Like he remembers emotions but not how to feel them. Oh, he can make the expressions and most of the time he gets the right ones, but he's got this odd way of cocking his head to one side when he's just so lost. Amelia says nothing to him, but sometimes he hears her muttering about angels when she thinks he’s out of earshot.  
  
But he does everything he's supposed to. He even opened that 401K she always wanted him to. He takes his pills and eats his food and goes to work and screws his wife and plays with his daughter and he tries so hard to be Jimmy Novak who has never had anything bad happen.

 

\--

It happens so subtly he barely even notices, but Amelia and Claire watch more tv and eat more food and hardly ever argue anymore. The smell of them is intoxicating, he can hardly stay in the same room.  
  
He doesn't understand it, or why it's not happening to him too, but Bob and Rick and Mike stop wanting to go out for beer after work, and start talking about inane tv shows they watch that they never watched before and oh god when did people start smelling like food? He starts wearing cologne not to mask his own smell, but to mask the smells around him. He encourages Amelia to wear perfume because he's got to mask the smell, it's just so intoxicating, and it's all he wants. He goes for walks, but the scents he catches there are even more distracting, so he takes longer and longer drives.  
  
He thinks of calling Dean and Sam, passes their number on his phone almost every day, but surely it isn't bad enough to uproot his life over again. Besides, they might bring back the angel and oh god he can't be tied to a comet again.  At least he knows the refrain to every almost-song he hears now.  
  
During the day, they buzz in his ears like a conversation rumbling in the other room, but at night the voices are clear like bells, vivid sharp hallucinations. Maybe he knows they're not audible but they still pull him from a solid sleep.  He feels sick to his stomach because his hunger grows every day by degrees and he doesn't understand any of it and they smell so good... It's almost enough to make him call the Winchesters, because this is something that makes no sense, and he needs things to make sense. He's Jimmy Novak, and nothing bad ever has happened to him.  
  
He bites his fingernails down to the quick and then the skin around his ragged fingertips and he chews straight through his lips; he can't stop. A cleaning accident sends them rushing to the hospital. The doctors don't know why it hurt him, but he seems fine now, recovering well--almost like it never happened. He tells them he picks at scabs and they ooze black pus, but the doctors say not to worry about it, it's perfectly normal for a man his age, and he can't imagine what that is supposed to mean. He hasn't seen red blood in months.  
  
Mostly he just tries not to think about it.  
  
He has to ignore the black and the smells and the hunger and the singing--especially the singing-- because he's taking his pills like Amelia asked. Everyone knows that taking his pills means he can't be losing it. Not again. One day, he accidentally cuts himself with a knife, and it oozes black before closing up like it never happened. Jimmy gets in the car and drives and drives.  
  
He watches TV with Claire and Amelia. He can't tell if it's the programming or if it's just him, but it doesn't hold his interest, and they smell too good to stay there long.  
  
He goes for longer drives. Sometimes he just sits in the park all day. His boss doesn’t say anything when he’s not there and he gets paid just the same. No one else seems to notice anything anymore.  He tries to make dinner, take up cooking as something to occupy his hands, but Claire and Amelia prefer take out from the restaurant down the road, or the tv dinners they can heat up in a couple of minutes.  
  
One day, a well-dressed woman comes into town with a loudspeaker and ushers everyone onto busses, one household at a time. Jimmy stands on his porch and keeps his family inside; she doesn’t call for the Novaks. No one ever comes back. He goes into work the next day, but no one is there and no one is at the stores and no one calls to ask why Claire doesn't show up for school.  
  
Jimmy takes his family to a hotel for a few days, and a few days becomes a few months, and that's when strangers start walking into their room. They never say anything; unless told otherwise, they lie motionless on the ground at Jimmy's feet.  
  
The singing has stopped being muffled, it screams through him like lightning, but at least he's starting to understand the sensation. The blotches it leaves on his vision open up, they show him things.  
  
Jimmy quickly turns people away at the door; they don't have enough room for them all. He's not really sure why they keep coming, but he realizes they're staying in the rooms around theirs. Sometimes they just sit in the middle of the street and he has to call them back or they will let themselves be hit by passing cars.  
  
He does try to call the Winchesters, finally--he can't do this alone anymore, they have to know something. But they just think he's playing some horrible joke on them. Dean growls that Cas said Jimmy had moved on years ago.  
  
Jimmy shouts that he didn't move on, he's right here and stuck with all of these people who just keep moving in nearby and why are they here and goddamn it Sam what's going on?  But they say they can't come help, they've got their own problems and something about chasing Dick?  
  
He's so...He'd be angry if he could, but he can't quite touch his emotions still, and he gets hungrier every day.  
  
He takes Amelia and Claire upstate to the country for a few days, where the air is a little clearer.  
Talking his way into the cabin is unpleasantly easy; the inhabitants wander aimlessly off into the woods. The days start to bleed into one another and eventually he stops wondering if anyone is searching for them.  
  
They can be the Novaks here just as easily as they were in Ohio. Jimmy insists on cooking for them--no takeout, all fresh groceries, only organic meats and vegetables, and he makes them take walks with him, he makes sure the tv only plays static.  He plays old cassette tapes on the radio. Sometimes he plays with the dials, half-wondering if he could pick up on angels again.  It seems important, if they could just get...if he could just fix whatever this is.  Everything will be okay, he’ll go back to being Jimmy Novak who’s never had anything bad happen to him, and his family will go back to arguing with each other about ridiculous things like whose turn it is to do the laundry.  
  
He has to remind himself, though, when he shaves. Black ooze seeps from the corner of his mouth, but whenever he touches his face, there's nothing there. The singing is loud and near-constant. He ignores it and takes his medicine. He has to stare in the mirror and ignore the blood and tell himself sternly that he's still Jimmy Novak and maybe bad things happened in the past, but they don't anymore.  
  
This is a good life, he says to himself, you have Amelia and you have Claire, and no one bothers you and you are safe and free.    
  
One day Jimmy sees himself leaning in the doorway in his old trench coat and suit. He almost walks right by.  
  
"What've we got to do to get you to pick up a phone, Jimmy boy? We've been calling you night and day."  
  
He’s studying his fingernails, almost nonchalant, and grins at him. The corners of his mouth don't fit in the confines of his face, and Jimmy wonders distantly why that's unusual.  
  
"We sent you all those gifts, and you just put them in storage. Aren't you hungry?"  
  
His stomach pulses with need and want and dark when they say that--it's never done that before.  
"You need to leave," Jimmy rasps, his throat suddenly dry.  
  
But his smile just widens, oh god how can it get any wider, and he shakes his head, "This is where we need to be, Jimmy Jim. High past time to make rounds and check up on our... investments. Making sure they're yielding dividends. Dick could explain better, but he's so busy with that throne of his, these days."  
  
"Listen, buddy," Jimmy says, and he can't believe he's saying this to himself, "I don't know you, and I don't know what you're talking about," but the other just looks down with a chuckle.  
  
"You can drop it now," He says, blue eyes wide and honest and empty. "The humans can't care about us anymore."  
  
As the pit of Jimmy's stomach sinks, thinking of the dullness in Claire's voice, the silence in Amelia's throat, how they look at him like thoughtless cattle, amazement dawns in the other man's eyes.  
  
"You went native."  
  
"How precious. Oh, James darling," he reaches for his face and Jimmy recoils.  
  
"I--I don't know what you mean," He stammers, backs up, feels his back slam against a wall trying to get away.  
  
"Look at you--like a newborn sitting on the dinner table," He coos, "without enough sense to even feed itself." A black line Jimmy has felt trickle down his own cheek pools down from the pupils in front of him. "Come, come, child, what fun! We haven't had an actual babe to care for yet; most of you manage to figure out this part, at least."  
  
He can hear his voice shouting protests but his grip on his arm is incredible and he's half-dragged across the cabin and it takes a moment to even register that he's buried his teeth into the other's wrist until he can almost feel his jaws meet through the bone.  The stranger lets go and Jimmy slams the hall door between them and Claire and Amelia.  
  
His breathing is ragged and he watches himself hiss and glower, licking at his wrist. "Naughty child, we would have a biter," he murmurs. "You'll always starve, but if you don't feed it'll just be miserable, Jimmy Jim," the calculating look narrows, "And there's such an abundance of food. So, eat, drink, and be merry. Daddy got that part right, at least."  
  
The taste in his mouth is eerily familiar, like motor oil and fermented carbon. "Get out," He says again, and there's an edge to his voice, like he heard in the songs.  
  
“We understand.” The man in his overcoat wraps a surreal tongue around his wounded wrist and pulls it away clean and healed. "You're suffering from vessel memory--that should clear up on its own. We'll send you up something to eat in the interim." When he vanishes, it's without the sound of folding cloth, or flapping wings; only the imperceptible breath of air filling the vacuum they leave behind.

 

\--

Jimmy moves.  
  
It’s a tiny nothing town just south of Oregon. They don't get a TV, and he still won't buy processed foods, but he thinks they could be safe there. The house is forty five minutes inland, which is a blessing; water courses through all the worst bits of his nightmares, but he can’t for the life of him remember why.  
  
Claire wants to go to the beach and that scares him more than he understands. Amelia offers to take her, but that scares him worse, they have to stick together, they have to be a family, he needs all his parts near him. He needs to be together and whole.  
  
The roads between the sequoias are quiet and the forest is old and that offers some comfort, at least.  
  
Amelia finds a library in town, starts to bring books home to keep Claire from being bored.  They're not difficult books and she gets distracted easily, but she's reading again.  
  
Jimmy keeps his body occupied chopping wood and cleaning house and doing chores. Some days Amelia seems like she recognises him; most days she just sits silently with Claire, or sleeps. Jimmy half-fills crossword puzzles and takes up sudoku, and nothing bad happens to him.  
  
It storms badly one night and he pulls the girls close and doesn’t let them go anywhere alone, not for anything. They’re asleep on the couch when he sees his own silhouette leaning against the kitchen counter in a flash of lightning. He chews through his lip, a nasty habit he really ought to curb, and gently moves the girls so he can stand.  
  
“Ah, Jimmy! There you are! We were beginning to worry you’d forgotten your manners.” His mirror’s mouth gives him a Cheshire worthy grin and Jimmy feels his skin crawl.  
  
“W-why are you here?” Jimmy feels his fingers twisting sharply around one another, knows he’s liable to break them like the other day, but he can’t help all the nervous habits he’s developed.  They’re the unfortunate byproduct of living on edge.  
  
The corners of the man’s grin downturn just a bit, displeased, and Jimmy shudders. Displeasure is not something his doppelganger is used to, clearly.  
  
“That nasty case of vessel memory should have cleared right up by now, Jimmy.” His gaze hardens and he winks out of existence to reappear before Jimmy in a careless display of power.  Clucking his tongue--forked tongue, Jimmy can’t help but notice-- the man catches Jimmy’s chin in his hand and pulls him close.  Without so much as a by-your-leave, the stranger jerks Jimmy’s head this way and that, appraising him with every glance.  
  
It doesn’t escape him that the edges of the man are black, almost like he’s been inked in, but the lines all drip and never dry.  If he wasn’t sure he’d pull back a stump, Jimmy would be tempted to touch, to see if this black is like the black that oozes from him when he cuts himself, or chews through his lip, or breaks his fingers again.  
  
“We simply don’t understand,“ the man’s voice cracks the plaster in the walls and Jimmy can feel the threads of his shirt unravelling. “Sweet child, you can’t tell us you don’t hunger, don’t starve for it. The hole of you calls to us. It is your very nature to hunger, to revel in the feast.” He drops Jimmy’s chin and Jimmy reaches up to massage his jaw, he thinks maybe he heard it crack on the last twist.    
  
“I...” Jimmy can’t lie about the hunger, it gnaws him from innards to bones and he has so much trouble ignoring it.  He takes a step back, swallows hard and says the only thing left in his head, “I am Jimmy Novak.  Nothing is more important than my family, and I--” he wants to say he can withstand anything to protect them, wants to tell this stranger who stretches his face how he’s been chained to a goddamn comet and no hunger can overcome him after that, but the man just chuckles.  
  
Then the man’s jaws open again and a series of sounds spills into the air between them, a collection of shapes that implode behind Jimmy’s eyes, things that can’t be properly described as words. They split the linoleum floor and hiss and steam like the whispers from his dreams. Memories of black, twisting shapes, and the echo of the gaping space in his own belly knock Jimmy to his knees. When he clears the pain from his eyes, the world is different, with vibrating colors so unfamiliar to his visual spectrum he’s never needed names for them before.  
  
The man standing in front of him is unusual, not because of the rows of teeth descending back into his mouth or the black puddle he’s leaving on the floor, but because of the nest of hair haphazardly sitting atop his skull and the cloth spread across his shoulders. His skin pulls tight across his bones; clearly a poor-fitting suit, at best. Jimmy’s never been so close to a skeleton.  
  
He twists his fingers together, looks down; his hands don’t fit, either. How can his hands not fit? They’ve always fit, there at the ends of his wrists, attached to the arms he’s always known. But, he can see how they don’t, how the bones press tight against his skin when he brings them to his face. It’s all he can do to tear his gaze from his straining fingertips and raise his head to look almost imploringly at the man before him.  
  
He’s on his knees before a man who might as well be himself, with his too-tight skin and his hands that don’t fit and he remembers the last time he was in a place like this, bleeding and begging for his daughter’s life with the last breath of his own.  Jimmy remembers swearing two oaths: that he could remain chained to a comet for as long as it took; and that if he ever miracled away, he’d never chain himself to anything again.  
  
On his knees before himself, Jimmy remembers a great number of things.  Some of them he even thinks might have happened to him. But these memories don’t quite fit. They press against his skin, pull it too tight against bone and muscle and deep, unabating hunger. He remembers that now clear as day, his steadfast companion through his marriage and his college years and his childhood and back before his birth, before there was such a thing as a Jimmy Novak, back, back, back, before there was such a thing as a Claire or an Amelia or a Winchester or even a Castiel. He remembers their teeth, his teeth, mouthing blindly in the dark, grasping, stretching, finding purchase only in the set of his own jaw.  
  
But he’s Jimmy Novak, he thinks uncertainly, who has never had anything very bad happen to him--or he was once, before he was Castiel. But before that, he’s not sure who he was--if he was anyone at all.  
  
The man disappears with a thunderclap that shakes the whole house, leaving him alone crumpled on the floor of his kitchen.

 

\--

The next day he checks to make sure the house has food and Claire has books and Amelia has what she needs, slips out the front door, and just starts walking. Hours, towns, sequoias pass him by before he realizes there’s nowhere to walk to. There’s nowhere else he’s meant to be, not truly.  
  
And maybe...Maybe he’d never quite been Jimmy Novak who has never had anything bad happen to him, is the thought that sticks with him in the wake of the stranger’s second visit. His skin doesn’t rubber band back from stretched too tight, and he’s starting to realize this is all there ever was. The press of bone and muscle to flesh, the tug of not quite his memories, but he can’t let it go.  If he can’t let go, and this is all there is, he’ll have to stay.  Sequoias, towns, and more hours pass before he’s back on the porch.  
  
Jimmy spends most nights on his roof, stargazing with Claire. She’s learning the names of the constellations; she really is quite sharp for her age. She knows Alpha Centauri and how to find Orion in the winter and Scorpio in the summer. Jimmy loves the night sky, but his eyes don’t jump from star to star, they weave between them in the dark empty channels of space. He can imagine his body twisting snugly between galaxies and through nebulae, carving deep, wide canyons through the universe with his teeth.  
  
“I made that part,” He tells Claire, his finger tracing a path in the hollow of Orion’s chest between Betelgeuse and Bellatrix. She only snorts and chastises him for being absurd.  
  
Jimmy is proud of her; at least, he’s an approximation of proud. He laughs and beams and kisses the crown of her head, which he remembers Jimmy doing when she got things right when she was younger. He’s pretty sure that’s what “proud” means, although it doesn’t match the word in his head: that word, he understands only enough not to say out loud.

 

\--

Claire is almost his height now.  
  
The woman calls him Jimmy, which annoys him. She seasons her cheeks with wet salt. He doesn’t know why he kept her this long; unlike the younger one, she is past ripe and starting to go bad.  
  
Some days he tries on Jimmy’s mannerisms for fun, to keep himself from getting bored; when he tires of that, he plays with echoes of Castiel and leaves desperate-sounding messages in Dean’s voicemail. He amuses himself by going out into the forest and singing lullabies in the old tongue through the split of ancient wood and the sickly sweet smell of decay. Claire doesn’t like it when he sings, but she doesn’t like it when he acts like Jimmy either. His impression is fading, and now that she’s seen what’s behind the curtain, his behavior has become a tired pantomime. The affection that crinkles his eyes never reaches his razor smile. She speaks to him harshly, but he hears it only faintly, as if he were lying on the bottom of a well.  
  
She wants to know who he sings to. He says the true word for him could cause her significant damage to hear, and there isn’t a good translation in her language, but he tries to explain anyway: the stranger in the overcoat is his father, his brother, his mother, his boss, his king, his god, his bigger piece, his better half, his eyes and ears and lungs and heart and blood; he is himself in whole, but so much greater than himself in parts.  
  
She smirks, sneers something about how funny it is, a monster with a poetic soul, and he flushes angrily and doesn’t know how to respond.  
  
He offers Jimmy’s limbs for her study, cutting himself open with knives and spreading chemicals across his forearm. He heals quickly and has a very high pain threshold. Claire has seen many things, felt the hot breath of the divine rise in her throat, has learned not to be squeamish. Jimmy is fascinated by her curiosity and lets her cut and push and examine until her fingers are stained black with muddy ink. She tugs at a tendon in his wrist and his ring finger curls into his palm; the wonder in her face is well worth any discomfort.  
  
One day he gets back from a run and finds the house empty and the car gone.  
  
For the length of an hour, he wanders around the house, altogether unsure of what to do with himself. After all, now he wouldn’t have to worry about bracing himself against their scents; in a few days, the house would air out, and the last of their smell would be gone in a few years. This was bound to happen eventually; both the females had been weaned almost completely off the processed opiates, and he couldn’t expect them to stay placid without it. He could find another family, maybe, one he wasn’t so goddamned concerned about all the time.  
  
But that rings hollow to him, for some reason--for the same reason, he thinks, that chasing them down and bringing them back seems ridiculous. What was he going to say to them? That he was his daughter’s father, his wife’s husband? What did he possibly expect would come of it? He could find a balance in their dosage, maybe--keep them doped up enough to stay, but conscious enough to make it worth playing “House.”  
  
Both options seem stupid. But nothing could be more foolish than staring at his hands in an old and empty house, so he leaves.  
  
He still doesn’t have anywhere to go, per se; his place was with the Novaks, because he’s Jimmy Novak, and so he drifts. The smell isn’t so pungent out this far, he figures he can go a while before reaching either civilization or before he needs a car again, so he walks.  It’s two weeks before he realizes he’s drifting with something like purpose.  
  
A month after he leaves the house and the sequoias and the silence, he catches a familiar scent.  He appropriates the first car he crosses; the owners haven’t been home in quite some time anyway.  
  
He drives toward the coast with the windows rolled down, hoping to catch the refrain of the scent he’s chasing again.  He caught it two days ago, outside a run down motel, so he knows he’s going the right direction.  Every mile brings him closer to the sea, he clenches his teeth until they shatter and recast themselves, and he’s had to switch cars twice because he ran out of steering wheel to clench.  But the scent is so sweet, so close, he can’t let even his abject terror of the sea slow him down.

 

\--

Of course he finds them near the water. It’s been almost two months and he’s tracked the scent through five different counties, but he’s found them.  Claire kicks the surf, Amelia is under an umbrella, all in all it could be the perfect family vacation.  He can’t move. He can’t let go of the car door or leave the parking lot or even consider walking down the beach. He can’t let all that water swallow him whole again.  
  
He smells them long before he sees them; the mob is a roiling wave coming down the beach instead of up to it, violence and blood soaking everything they touch. Claire can’t smell them, Amelia...Well, he tries not to think about exactly how use--helpless Jimmy’s wife is.  He bites straight through his lip and lets go of the car door; the metal shrieks and groans as he unclenches, but it’s not loud enough to fight the roar of the ocean or attract attention from anyone on the beach.  
  
There’s one goal before him now, and everything clicks. He moves like a serpent across the sand and marvels at how slow they all are. Claire turns, sluggish, and pulls a shotgun from a bag next to Amelia. His teeth descend, not the brittle porcelain flats he keeps breaking, but his true teeth, long and solid as daggers. He buries them in the neck of a blood-crazed mutation, feeling it squelch between his jaws like rotting fruit. Claire fires two shots, runs, reloads; Amelia’s finally on her feet, dragging the bag behind her. He tears two more of them apart before the mob notices he’s there.  
  
Their taste has a rotted, saccharine note to it, a sulfuric burn that makes him gag. He can almost see their degraded brains register him as a threat; even hell-infected mutations retain enough instinct to fear a gaping maw.  His head swims as the mutations stutter and stall before him, one row crashing into the next. Some part of him hears Claire shouting Jimmy’s name from further up the beach.  It is all he can do to follow the sound; the mutations won’t pursue him now. Whatever frontal lobe is left to them ensures that two humans aren’t worth the price.  
  
His teeth retract and he has to wipe the blood from his eyes in order to see. His lungs heave, oddly out of breath, despite the flood of endorphins egging him on to continue the hunt, to chase down the last straggling runners. He looks at his family, licks the gore from his cheek, and starts to understand what about them drove him so insane all this time.  
  
The sand is soft and vaguely clumpy, so it’s not so bad when he falls from the force of a shotgun blast to the chest.  
  
Claire struggles to reload, yells something at Amelia, who has a pistol trained on him but hasn’t shot yet. Jimmy sits up, unperturbed by the black lines running down the front of his shirt, and tries to stand, but gravity is suddenly going in weird directions. “Oh,” he slurs hazily, trying to place the sensation, “I’m okay, m’okay, ‘m juss...drunk..?” His head reels and the sand rushes up to greet him again.

 

\--

An unfamiliar ceiling swims into focus. Jimmy blinks, stretches his arms until the bones crack and reform, and wishes again that his skin wasn’t quite so tight.  Before he can swing his legs over the side of the couch, a shotgun barrel is shoved against his neck.  
  
“Took you long enough,” a voice grouses above him.  Claire’s face appears at the other end of the shotgun. “I didn’t think it would take this long.  But you’re up now. That’s something, I guess.”  
  
Jimmy’s never seen Claire look so rough around the edges before. He slowly raises a hand and pushes the barrel away, “That...Didn’t work on the beach,” he grimaces, the words splinter across the back of his throat but he gets them out anyway.  Claire shrugs but doesn’t drop the gun.  Instead, she backs up and sits in a chair across from the couch, still training the shotgun on Jimmy.  
  
“Maybe not, but it slowed you down. I’ll take what I can get,” she spits out.  Jimmy nods and finally sits up.  Claire tightens her grip on the butt of the shotgun and Jimmy holds out his hands in supplication.  
  
“Claire, I have never intentionally hurt you or your mother,” he tries.    
  
She shakes her head, “Doesn’t mean you won’t.  You ripped through those guys like they were nothing.  You’re wrong.” And that makes the most sense of anything.  He is wrong; he’s always been wrong. “But...You ripped through those guys like they were nothing,” her tone has changed; turned considering.  
  
Jimmy licks his lips, tries to refrain from biting them. “I did.”  
  
“You ate them,” she’s too indecisive. She should shoot him again, he needs to know she has that much self preservation left in her.  He’s twisting his fingers, hears the bones crack.  Claire twitches. “Don’t,” she demands, “You shouldn’t--”  He can see she’s torn between training the shotgun on the monster in front of her and wanting to check on her father’s broken fingers.  
  
“I, it’s okay,” he shakes out his hands, the bones clacking back into place, “Nervous habit.”  
  
“A shotgun won’t kill you, you ate those people with teeth you don’t have anymore, and your nervous habit is breaking all the bones in your fingers?” The muzzle of the shotgun tips toward the ground. “What...What am I even supposed to do with that?” She sounds so lost; Jimmy wishes he could help, find her again.  
  
“I don’t know,” he finally admits, “I don’t know what that means anymore than you do.” He leans forward carefully. “And...I’m not your father, I don’t think. Not really. I might’ve been once, I can remember being Jimmy Novak, but...” He shakes his head. “All I know is, I need to keep you and your mother safe. And, apparently, I can do that.”  
  
Claire traces patterns in the dusty floor with her shoe, “That’s not...You’re not the first thing that looked like my dad and said that, you know.”  
  
Jimmy bites through his lip with a nervous laugh. “No, I guess not.”  
  
He catches himself twisting his fingers again and looks up at Claire instead. “I’m pretty sure, whatever I am, I’m not an angel with any mission to rush off to. I’d like to stick around, if you’ll have me.”  
  
She sighs, blowing her bangs out of her face, “So you’re not an angel and you’re not my dad and you eat people, and you want to stay.”    
  
“Yes.”  
  
“You’re--just remember you’re not him, okay? You can’t be him,” she waves the shotgun in his direction with no real intent.  
  
“I’m not sure who else to be,” he confesses, “but I’ll do my best.”  
  
Claire shrugs, “We’ll figure it out.”


End file.
